My Challenge to Portuguese politicians:

Dear Portuguese politician,

Thank you for taking the time to read this message. Please bear with me and listen to these two episodes of the Allusionist and then think for a moment about the Portuguese 1990 language agreement.

I hope this didn’t mess your political convictions, but if by any chance the neuron in your brain made the connection please go get elected and revoke that stupid law.

thank you,

D.

PS – I really don’t want a technocratic portuguese and don’t need it.

PS2 – Did you noticed the small caps? did you? Smart Reader!!!

Eu Votava Num Partido Que . . .

  • Revogasse o acordo ortográfico de 1990. Acho que não é preciso explicação para este desastre em que só a classe política continua a insistir.
  • Propusesse o 10 de Junho como data única para a realização de eleições. E tomadas de posse na primeira segunda-feira subsequente. Que dia de Portugal poderia ser melhor celebrado do que com o acto democrático e acabava-se com a fantochada dos partidos escolherem datas de acordo com o seus interesses. Não se demoravam três meses a tomar posse e a formar governo e dava-se tempo para que novos governantes pudessem fazer orçamentos para o ano seguinte.
  • Impedisse titulares de cargos políticos que se demitissem ou fossem demitidos de se candidatar por 5 anos. Num caso ou noutro são pessoas inaptas para governar, logo devem ser afastadas compulsivamente para evitar a utilização de demissões como jogada de política baixa.
  • Tivesse uma ideia para os portugueses que não seja a de os ver de avental e bandeja a servir estrangeiros.
  • Apostasse definitivamente em ciência e resolvesse o problema dos doutorados a prazo que servem de mão de obra barata para as universidades portuguesas.
  • Revertesse a perseguição às mulheres que este governo implementou no que diz respeito à introdução de taxas moderadoras e às consultas obrigatórias na interrupção de gravidez. Será que temos que ser um país tacanho de mentalidades e de atitudes?
  • Colocasse na constituição um desemprego SUB 5% em vez de querer colocar lá um déficit sub qualquer coisa.
  • Tivesse mais mulheres (principalmente mães) nas suas fileiras do que homens gordos.
  • Obrigasse a um serviço mínimo garantido de internet para todos os portugueses. Uma pen USB/ ou só o cartão/ com 256Kb/s de largura de banda que permitisse ter sempre acesso. Acesso à internet seria uma garantia constitucional.
  • Mudasse o processo democrático para o mundo digital. Eleições, referendos, decisões camarárias. Todas poderiam ser participadas por todos a partir de um computador. Acabar com esta parvoíce que é não poder votar porque estou em viagem no estrangeiro.
  • E por fim, eu votava num partido que não prometesse nada desta lista, porque todos mentem nas promessas. Não quero promessas, quero actos e se começassem por esta pequena lista já ficávamos um bocadinho satisfeitos.

Second Life Abandoned Virtual Realities

There is something strange about online entities, be it blogs, virtual games, moocs, or vles. There’s something ethereal about all those entities. Because they will fade away quickly as they were praised. They have a lifetime so short that some users are still hanging to those entities while the servers are being shut down. An example is Second Life islands. How many abandoned places are still there in Second Life. Ghost of 2007 gold run. Who is paying for them? Some of these places were never really popular. The virtual worlds were sold by the companies that promoted them to suckers that spent much real money to buy virtual goods, islands and services.

Second Life is only an example, but you can clearly imagine the same thing happening to other worlds like WoW or Minecraft. Obviously right now they are highly sought and present users might say that they don’t feel that the online entity is going to disappear. Are really you sure about that? Second Life was a pain. A evolved IRC for finger and imagination impaired people. I never liked it, but just 8 years ago everybody was writing about it (me included saying how bad it was (in PT)).

The moral of finding all these abandoned places in the virtual worlds is that there always some Bullish movement sponsored by companies that are real Bears. Be careful where you place your online bets. We really need an Internet janitor.

Some Thoughts on the Greek Democracy

Pnyx

  • The athenian democracy first appeared in ancient Greece in Athens in 508 BC and while it had its problems (only 1/5 of the population could vote for example) it was the first case where direct decision by the citizens steered the polis forward. As in the past Greek Democracy is going back to its roots and asking their citizens to decide their future in the way they’ve taught the world to do.
  • 10M Greeks are going to vote today and why is this Pnyx gathering scaring the remaining Europeans? The reality is that the EU/IMF/ECB has been playing the “we don’t care what happens to you if you don’t play along with us” bluff for so long that Greece may be close to calling the bluff today—if the OXI wins. And that’s probably why suddenly the EU is campaigning for the NAI to win like they never did before. But this shows you how week non-democratic governments are. The bureaucrats of Europe are trembling with fear.
  • Greece government in the past have overspent. That is undeniable, but the vision in this conservative Europe is that their banks are entitled to receive their money back even if that provoques a social destruction (as long it is greeks population suffering that is OK, seems to be the rational) of a poor foreign country. There is no Ethical concern in money lending.
  • There is no exist strategy. Every EU bureaucrat acts like a couch coach. They know everything, and they know better. Or are they just repeating instructions coming from somewhere else?
  • Greece debt is around €323bn of witch around €165bn are owed to Germany, France, Italy and Spain alone. Four EU countries have more than 50% of Greek debt in their hands. Worse thing and scariest thing is that Spain is the fourth with €25bn. Guess why is everybody so scared of Greece exiting? Can one escape an avalanche?
  • My opinion is that greeks should do what greeks decide to do. Since when should Greece do things that interest Brussels and are decided by Brussels instead of doing what is of Greek interests? Can you imagine Brussels dictating what the UK should do internally? Would its population ever accept that? Well why should Greece accept then that someone in Brussels that works 9 to 5 dictates what they should do?
  • I’ve always thought about EU as a democracy of the nations of Europe but since the EU succumbed to become just the market of nations the EU is loosing its appeal. And that is why so many right wing nationalist movements are emerging across the Eurozone. Not because they are against the EU per se, but because this EU, this comercial entity that is the modern EU is not democratic and is all about money. And in the end if the only policy of this EU is money, why would anyone want to participate if the returns are only measured in terms of financial capital? While the EU doesn’t restructure itself to be the cohesive social force we’ll see these appeals to ban the monetarily weak from the union, to close borders, and burn witches in bonfires.
  • The EU solidarity spirit has been lost. Jacques Delors, one of the truly last European leaders, just wrote an article in Le Monde where he asks European leaders for a solidarity plan to save Greece. He asks for cooperation and solidarity, two lacking qualities of disintegrating Europe.

Is Big Data Cause or Consequence

Our world has everything connected. Data is readily available. Humans spend their time producing digital breadcrumbs. And all this data can be collected and analysed in ways that are new and never before imagined.

Is Big Data Cause Or Consequence

When discussing big data sometimes we worry about the difficulty of managing data being produced. The difficulty lays because the data is heterogeneous, because it appears in high volumes and with variety. This led to the appearance of the ‘paragon’ 3V (Variety, Velocity, and Volume of data).

But this corresponds to two views of our society. One that is technical. Another is social.

The growth in data, the growth in the capacity to analyse it, and the growth of Echelon to gather communications in real time are inevitable. These are infrastructural problems. The view of the world as a technological system. A system that wants to extract more and more information, process it in a sequence of marginal gains to find and tell (usually the verb is sell) us the secret patterns we didn’t know about ourselves.

The socio-cultural factors show a picture of society changing. People produce more data because people want commodity. The commodity to press a button in the fridge and place automatic orders for milk on the local store of choice. Were cars will be autonomous and safer because they talk to each other. Where people want to share their photos with family. And in all these processes some (or many) metadata will be shared. The Internet of Things allows anyone to convert a simple electric toy with a microcontroller to repurpose it and connect it to the IoT. We are all happily contributing to the digitisation of everything.

The data produced has always been a problem for those that want to understand it. For them knowledge is paramount. They can be monks copying ancient manuscripts in the medieval ages being technological challenged when wanting to copy an entire library. Or they can be IBM deploying Apache-Spark as the next big hammer after Hadoop. There is always a limitation to the amount of data society can process. And there is always some limitation to the amount of information that one can extract from that data. There is always a limit, and although the term Big Data is new, the problem isn’t.

The digitisation of the world we know is a social phenomenon that is growing with each new device sold. The life simplification of digitisation causes the production of streams of data and metadata that some consider excessive. Security can be a problem, but changes will happen, not because technology imposed by big companies, but because society needs the changes to accommodate our new needs. We want to be connected and functional in the modern world.

This discussion leads me to think that we are dealing with two views of the Big Data. One, that treats Big Data as the technological challenge of gathering, processing, and acting upon the world. Where Data is increasingly being produced and promoted as fueling advances of the future. And for this, we’ll need to be able to understand those streams of data. Another is to look at this as a sociological phenomenon where the growing digitisation of the planet is producing changes at a faster pace. In it Big Data is just a side effect of this social change. So, is Big Data Cause or Consequence?

This seems to be a chicken and egg problem. Is Big Data the analysis of more and more data, and with that analysis the cause of new knowledge that is transformative to the society? Or is the digitisation of the world and the social changes observed, producing a drastic change in the output of their digital signatures, that Big Data is a side product of?

The truth is that the two phenomena might be interconnected in a positive feedback mechanism. The more we see behavioural changes in the population, the more data will be produced and the more the technicalities of Big Data will be publicised. The more Big Data guardians have knowledge about the world, the more will they act on it, asking for more data. If you imagine what society can be if you read an encyclopaedia, imagine what it can produce when Watson receives enough information to decide the next fashion trend.

The present is the inventor of the future. And the question comes down to individual participatory choices (at least in democratic worlds). You cannot escape the future, but you can choose how much you want to engage with it. Progress (as a transformative force) is upon us every day. But progress is a society concept, not a technical one. And how much you engage is always going to be relative to a moving baseline, and not to a fixed reference point. The digitisation of the world is making Earth a better place (even if will be too hot to live in it soon).

Today’s Big data challenges are just the same of the past. How society changes and technology evolves are like the two faces of a Möbius strip. Both interconnected, always affecting each other in eternal motion. Always on an eternal continuum like present and future.

O Portugal do rapaz do bombo

O primeiro ministro continua na sua senda de arrogância, que disse ou que não disse, que vai dizendo ou que fica calado. Do alto de um pedestal suportado por um partido de 10% julga-se um D. Sebastião que leva os Portugueses para uma nova batalha de Alcácer Quibir. Sempre como se estivesse a tocar uma flauta mágica e os ratos o seguissem cegamente.

Mas que importa o que diz este primeiro ministro? Se por acaso Portugal entrasse em guerra com algum vizinho e o primeiro ministro fosse apanhado de pantufas, sem ter tempo de dizes “Eu declaro guerra a… X” poderia dizer a seguir que a guerra era uma miragem, ou culpa dos portugueses, que desafiava alguém a procurar quando é que teria ele levado o país para a guerra?

A verdade é que um primeiro ministro tanto é responsável pelo que diz, como pelo que não diz. Ser primeiro ministro não é ser sabugo do estrangeiro enquanto é hostil do nacional. Os portugueses que foram atirados para foram podem, um a um, dizer-lhe, não as palavras que o primeiro ministro diz que não disse, mas o hostilidade que sentem dos governantes portugueses em relação aos nacionais. A hostilidade em relação às ideias produzidas internamente. Os entraves nas coisas mais mundanas para que se possa levar a vida sem controlo. Sem a ameaça constante do estado que trata os nacionais como criminosos. Não há outra ideia de Portugal neste governo que não seja a de um Portugal empregada doméstica do estrangeiro.

Nunca se viu um governo para o qual ser Português significasse tão pouco e onde aquilo que verdadeiramente lhe interessa é popular as nossas cidades de alemães, angolanos ou chineses endinheirados, enquanto aos portugueses é vendida a cantiga de ir conquistar Alcácer Quibir. Com flautas, pandeiros, guitarradas e muita festa.

Não, não me interessa se o primeiro ministro disse ou não disse. A verdade é o êxodo aconteceu, por acção ou inacção. E tudo o resto é conversa fiada e barulho, como se de um bombo de festa se tratasse, que de tanto rufar acaba com a pele rompida, mas onde o rapaz do bombo continua a bater, porque o que importa é fazer barulho, que é festa, que é preciso levar esta gente para Alcácer Quibir contente e sossegada.

10 Junho, Woburn Sands, UK

— David

Outlaw police

A football match, a family of 3 generations and a bad cop. It is not only America that has problems with the latter.

And, like in America, here in Portugal they immediately started writing a story to cover the facts, except that the cameras were rolling. But as in so many aspects of portuguese daily life you have to shut up and move on, be quiet about things, don’t talk about it. I hope that this barbarian acts are not forgotten and this rampaging cop becomes ex-cop and is prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

It is all emotion, but we are all alone in the end.

— Sentiment Analysis, sentiment analysis, sentiment analysis. Argh… How do SVM, Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, Multilayer Perceptrons, Best-first Trees, Functional trees, and C4.5 compare? Psomakelis et al. did a comparative study of twitter. Sentiment analysis is probably one of the most dangerous approaches to understanding crowd behaviour because it is dictating what normality is. A normality that comes from big data processing. This means that for practical purposes—read commercial—many normal behaviours will become outliers… and you might become targeted for “corrective emotional measures”—meaning that you’ll buy that new godWatch they are trying to sell. Well, fascinating dystopia this one that we are building. The science part of it is cool.

— What is strategy, again? I just say… let the algorithms kick in and you’ll need to make this question again, and again, and again, and you’ll need an algorithm to answer it because human brains will not be able to cope with the answer very soon.

— Lily, the first throw and shoot camera. Now, selfies suck. But everybody is taking selfies. Then came the selfie stick. That everybody thinks is ridicule but that you see in every corner of any touristic location. And now??? the Selfie Drone? Crap… THE WORLD IS BECOMING A LONELY PLACE. GET A FRIEND PEOPLE.

— And speaking of loneliness, Sudan needs a partner. This is very sad story but I imagine that human (selfie) stupidity will put the northern white rhino in the same shelf as the Dodo.